“The Muslim world’s obsessive, compulsive hatred of Jews has reached such epic proportions, it has become a collective mental illness with no cure.”

Gatestone Institute No matter how hard or how often we Muslims try, we are never able finally to end the connection our lives seem to have with the lives of the Jews. Watching Arab and Islamic television, especially during the holy month of Ramadan, brings the viewer to the inescapable conclusion that we have no real lives of our own, no unity and no value: our only motivation is having the Jews as a common enemy, with our lives dependent on them.

We treat the Jews the way the rabid Christian anti-Semites treated them in the Middle Ages, blaming them for every illness, tragedy and misfortune. We blame them for the failures of Islam while only we are at fault for the catastrophes that befall us.

Almost no Ramadan evening goes by without tedious “historical” dramas on Al-Jazeera and the other Arab TV channels, whose objective is to brainwash viewers with anti-Semitic propaganda. They deal with the Jews’ denial of the Prophet Muhammad’s message, Jewish attempts to poison him and their betrayal of him at the Battle of the Trench in Al-Medina.

Almost all the series’ end on the same note: the message is always that the fate of the Jews in the Palestine they stole from the Arabs will be the same as that Muhammad wreaked on them at Khybar, they will be slaughtered and their women and children will be sold into slavery.

That kind of incitement lends the Jews a Satanic power, it makes us think they can manipulate events around the world and are historically responsible for planning and carrying out every evil that exists. In reality, however, all it does is glorify their capabilities and achievements to the extent of turning them into a self-important legend.

Thus we ourselves construct the myth of the genius of the Jews, their intellectual might and creative talents, while personally I am not entirely sure they deserve the reputation: they are mere mortals like everyone else, and often less.

In my opinion, the situation has reached such proportions within the nation of Islam that it is now a national mental illness, a collective obsession for which I see no cure. We accuse the Jews of wanting to rule the world, but one of the causes of our illness is that we expect Islam to take over the world.

Regression and the lack of social and governmental flexibility, along with poverty and ignorance, perpetuate the impotence of the nation of Islam and make it impossible for us to change, develop and progress — a frustrating, ugly situation. While we have dreams of ruling the world, we wallow in disease and poverty, and we are behind the times in all the modern fields of endeavor.

Our various regimes enjoy religious and tribal backing, that is why they are anti-democratic and cannot be saved. We find comfort only in recklessly bringing untold masses of children into a world with nothing to offer them.

The countries of western Europe were all lucky enough, or wise enough, to cast off the political rule of fanaticism in the Middle Ages and to separate church and state. Today Christianity is a normative social value, a matter of personal conscience, and it dictates and practices enlightenment rather than violence and oppression.

The separation of church and state made it possible for Europeans – and Americans – to progress, and it gave them a tremendous advantage over the rest of the world. We, on the other hand, are still living in the Dark Ages.

The Christians’ enlightened, moderate attitude toward the Islamic communities in European cities, which is partially a function of fear, causes our extremist Muslim brothers to escalate their violence toward the communities hosting them, mistakenly assuming that Christian moderation is the result of the weakness of Western society. The result is that as time passes Islamophobia grows greater.

Despite the new Enlightenment, many Europeans, among them the leaders of the European Union, are still fundamentally and militantly anti-Semitic. Instead of attacking the Jews head-on the way their ancestors did — by simply passing discriminatory laws, forcing them to live in ghettoes and killing them — they now politically correctly attack Israel, pretending that Israelis are not Jews. Beneath their political correctness their ancient, inbred anti-Semitism still smolders.

For some Christians, as for the Muslims, hatred of the Jews is built on an ancient religious foundation, a legacy from the Middle Ages, and it is so basic and so well rooted that they are willing to support the Muslims in almost anything, as long as it harms the Jews in some way.

The result is that we Muslims make the mistake of thinking Europeans really care about them, especially the Palestinians. We are wrong: Europeans simply hate the Jews more than they hate and fear us. The bitter truth is that the Europeans usually intervene in a crisis only if it gives them the opportunity for Jew-bashing. When hundreds of thousands, even millions, of Muslims are slaughtered by other Muslims, such as the massacre in Syria and recent upsurge of violence in Darfur, the apathetic European leadership does not lift a finger.

At the same time, the European Union is obsessed with its need to condemn, sanction and boycott the Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank. It does not even mention Syria, with its hundred thousand civilians murdered by the government and its millions of refugees, or the atrocities being committed in the Arab-Muslim world, the rapes of women and children, the beheadings and the wanton cruelty and murder, to say nothing of exploitation, discrimination, slavery and other crimes against humanity.

To my great sorrow, everywhere in the world where there are Muslims there is murder, mass bloodshed and terrorist attacks. We should leave the Jews alone, they are not responsible for our tragedies and hating them will not cure the nation of Islam or bring it successfully into the 21st century.

“Settled by civilisations spanning some five millennia, Gaza has been built layer-upon-layer since the Bronze Age.

As each era ended, its people left behind remnants of their times – churches, monasteries, palaces and mosques, as well as thousands of precious artefacts.”

Detail from mosaic in 6th century Synagogue from Gaza

So from its very beginning, this article airbrushes out any mention of one group of people who were among the most consistent inhabitants of Gaza, beginning with the Hasmoneans in 145 BCE (long before the religions which built churches, monasteries or mosques were founded) through the Middle Ages and up to 1929 when, in the wake of the Hebron massacre, the British mandatory authorities ordered the Jews of Gaza to leave.

Israelis, however, do get a mention in this BBC feature. It is, according to the author, because of them that Gaza’s archaeologists have no equipment to take care of the antiquities and cannot attend professional conferences abroad.

“It is not only war that makes her job so hard. Israel strictly controls passage out of Gaza, for what it says are security reasons, and does not allow in machinery and other equipment which it suspects can be used against it by militants.”

“People working here can’t travel for training outside and we are only able to use local tools, which don’t allow us to excavate in a precise manner,” Ms Albetar said.” [emphasis added]

It is also suggested that because of Israel that the people of Gaza have, apparently, little interest in its archaeological treasures.

“Most Gazans are too preoccupied with high unemployment, poor housing and the restrictions on agriculture, fishing and importation to care about ruins and antiquities.”

Of course no real context is given either by the author of this piece or her Hamas-employed interviewees as to why restrictions exist or what steps Hamas might take to reduce the risk to archaeological artifacts by ending its terror war on Israeli civilians. Instead, this article is constructed in such a way as to leave the reader with the impression that Israel alone is to blame for the impending loss of historical treasures.

The reason behind that becomes a little clearer if one stops to take a look at the ideological CV of the article’s author.

Inevitably, Ruqaya Izzidien’s writings on Gaza-related subjects paint context-free, monochrome portraits of helpless Palestinians just trying their best to get along under the yoke of Israeli restrictions, and without any agency of their own. This latest piece for the BBC is no exception.

Does the BBC really think it appropriate to reduce the standard of its reporting even further by providing a platform for the kind of ideologically-motivated polemics which are to be found in abundance on anti-Israel sites such as those which already publish Ms Izzidien’s work?From BBC watch